Friday, June 22, 2012

When the end
came for my mighty iron friend, it was over in a few ticks of the clock. A
lonely flat, straight, two-lane road, short of the North Dakota border at
mile marker 103 on U.S. 12 North, just south of Big Thunder, SD at seven o’clock in the morning making
for Great Falls Montana.

The signs said
“Sharp Drop” and “Soft Shoulder.” The right front wheel went over the drop and onto
that shoulder sodden with rain (with an assist from me) and we never achieved pavement again. We
traveled through some long grass to a culvert and she stopped and lay down. now done.

Juan and I
remained relatively unscathed, I left for a hospital emergency room in Hettinger, North
Dakota, while Juan remained to stand guard. He was upright and watching only a few feet away I was told, when they came to take her away.
After a body scan and more x-rays than need be recounted, the doctor told me--as they had Yogi Berra after x-rays of his head, “They
didn’t find nothin'.” I am home now, this time by air after a
few days of mopping up.

My brave companion, transportation, and shelter for the past 11 years remains in the salvage yard in a speck of a town called
Reva, between Bison and Buffalo South Dakota. She will be valued and hauled away. I visited
her briefly to remove belongings and found Juan a wonderful new home watching over the house and garden of the salvage man, his wife and child, their pet goat and
pot-bellied pig, and lovely Arabian horse. He is happy in his new life.

We shall see
if there are to be further travels of Reamus. First we will sort the detritus
recovered, thank our personal god that our companion protected us so well, and
leave decisions for another day.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

The foreign travel is over for the year, partially because
of the stationary weather front that simply would not leave the border area. If
I remained further north it was warmer and sunnier. I decided that Duluth was
just a bridge to far and came out just north of Thief River Falls and east of Bemidji,
the rain followed the next day and the cold the day after that.

Thief River Falls is on the Red Lake River at the confluence
of the Thief River. It was established in 1887, was a hub for the “Soo”
railroad, is sometimes known as simply TRF and is actually more charming than
its name. It has, as with all the towns up here a complicated history of Indian
habitation with the Dakotas and the Ojibwe being the predominant tribes. There
was once a reservation there with the odious name of “The Moose Dung
Reservation” that finally was merged with the Red Lake Reservation once some
semblance of peace was established between the two tribes.

Like many towns large and small Middle America, it has a
city park that incorporates a campground. The “tender” of the one in TRF told me
that it is an old tradition when state parks, propriety RV parks and Interstates
were not common. Some are more elaborate than others, the smaller ones simply offering
a shady spot off the highway to park for the night. They are tended by
volunteers or city employees who take great pride in them. Oddly they are
rarely abused by the grateful users. The one in Thief River Falls is excellent.
There are twenty campsites in a capacious park along the Red Lake River that
offer free Wi-Fi and cable as well as electricity and water for a mere twenty
American dollars. After the prices experienced in Canada, even at the Provincial
Parks it was a real bargain. I stopped for fuel on Saturday and asked a man in
line if there was a campground nearby and he proudly told me of it and how to
find it and said he hoped I’d like it.

It was a nice welcome back present even if the foul weather
did find me the next day. Lots of people came by to stare at the California
plates and start a conversation. Nearly all these start in the same way:

“Long way
from home!”

“Yes sir/ma’am.”

“Where you
headed?”

“Oh, not sure.
East for now.”

And it goes on from there usually including the fact that someone
in their family or they know lives within a twenty mile radius of my house.
They want to tell me all about their trip to Disneyland and perhaps the San
Diego Zoo and tend to ignore anything I ask about the local area or wave a hand
indicating that it isn’t worth talking about. Occasionally, and I relish these
occasions, I get a local who is a bit of an historian who will tell me all
about the place. I found these types far more common in Canada. Taciturn is a
word I often use to describe Canadians. They are not all that way but have
always seemed more relaxed than we are on previous trips.

This time I sense things have changed. The oils sands discovery
in Alberta and its huge industrial impact on the whole Province and the rest of
the country changed the place. It is expensive to live there and the people are
at least in the cities in more of a hurry. Several of my native campground
acquaintances found my perception right and didn’t seem comfortable about it.

So Reamus has made the U-turn to the west now. Home is still
a few weeks away, but the journey feels half over in that way when you begin
passing through states you have been in earlier. Minnesota was a state I spent
nearly a month in a year or two ago and is familiar. From the lovely college town
of Bemidji on the lake, the only lake north of its’ source that the Mississippi
River flows through, we are now back in rural America stopping at Pipestone in the
far eastern, prairie side of the state. It rained overnight but clears to a
breezy and pleasant afternoon. Next will be northern South Dakota, pausing only
to revisit a state recreation area along the Missouri River familiar from an
earlier journey along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Then back to Montana to visit
a monument to Sitting Bull near Billings I have somehow missed. The way home
includes a trip down U. S. 395 a once iconic route through Alturas and
Susanville in California’s far eastern corner, the only part of the state I‘ve
never been in before. It is still a long way. There will be more to see and
share.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Moving east across Canada, the mountains are left behind.
The Province of Alberta becomes dead flat just outside the National Park. If
the State tree in Kansas is the telephone pole as some critics have it, then
the Provincial Tree of Alberta is the fence post.

About the time you reach the other side of Medicine Hat you are
convinced. The odd name for the town legend has it was the result of a tribal
Medicine Man losing his “bonnet” during a battle and the Cree’s subsequent lost
the battle. They never forgave him. History does not record his fate.

Suddenly the tug of an uphill climb is sensed in La Coachasita outside of town and 34
kilometers southeast of the Queens Highway you find the Inter-Provincial Park
at Cypress Hill. The elevation here is the same as the mountain they ski on at
Whistler far north and west in the Rockies. It is one of the very few areas of
Canada that was not covered by glaciers during the ice age and had a substantial
population during that time and may well have been part of a corridor that
allowed humans and animals to continue to migrate from the Alaskan land bridge.
The remains of ice age mammoths and camels have been found far to the south in
Arizona and elsewhere. Many of the ancestors of the Navajo, Hopi and Lakota
Sioux and other tribal civilizations are found here and well south of here. The
conclusion is that they came this way more than 1,000 years ago. It is hard to
wrap my head around the idea that the Indians living in Arizona are direct
descendants of those peoples. Genealogy is not my subject but that is
impressive.

There are an abundance of pines as well as deciduous trees
including birch and cedar as well as wildlife found more likely in a more
mountainous environment which make it a wonderfully diverse place to wander.
Moose, cougar and beaver are here. You can visit the new and old beaver dams up
the streams, the muskrat homes in the marsh along the lake. The Cedar trees are
stripped of bark in places. They provide sustenance to the moose that tough it
out in the forest in the brutal winters here and eat most anything they can
find.

The exercise conscious Canadians are out jogging and biking
on the cool clear mornings. My
neighbors, a delightful couple from a mere 40 miles away, deny that there is
less obesity here, but I am still looking for my first morbidly obese person
wearing sweat pants because that is all that fit, a common sight at home.

The weather is warm and mostly sunny. Last night there were
thunderstorms that apparently are so rare here they were the talk of the
village coffee house this morning. At we are under a very rare tornado warning,
which for this grizzled veteran of the mid-west campgrounds finds amusing in
the way the locals are reacting to it. One touches down in the Province about
20 miles to the west. I feel no more than a strong breeze and an increase in
humidity. My hope was that it would be cancelled before midnight so that some
amateur didn’t decide we needed to congregate in the visitor center for the
night. There are precautions I take when this happens and I took them, singling
up to only the electric line and running everything internally that I can.
Before sleep I switched the refrigerator to gas in case the power is lost, I won’t
lose the food. The temperature dropped ten degrees in an hour and while rain
and hail were possible, neither happened here.

The trip over included a stop at Fort Mc Murray, the first
of the Northwestern Mounted Police as they were first known. It was 14 miles
down a gravel road and sadly is in great disrepair. There is a plaque and a
flag that mark the spot. Fort Walsh, named after the first Commander which is
part of this complex has fared better. The former was put there during the time
before the definitive survey was taken to establish the 49th
parallel as the border between Canada and those people to the south. The
latter, Fort Walsh had a more violent beginning and interesting history. The distinctive
red tunic that we identify with the RMCP today was first worn here and became a
sign of trust to the Indians known here as members of the “First Nations.”

James Morrow Walsh was 35 years old on the November night in
1873 when troubled village here finally spilled over into violence. Hunters,
known as “Wolfers” locally were abundant here as were people of the Cree Black
Feet and the Metis (accent over the “e”), the name given the tribe which resulted
in the intermarriage between the hunters and native women. While they were
nomadic and followed the bison herds as did the natives, their dress and
dwelling were decidedly European. A wolfer’s horse was stolen. He blamed a member
of the Metis tribe and shot him. Further violence erupted all night. The Dominion
government decided they had seen enough in this place with a history of strife,
whiskey runners and other bad actors behaving violently and asked Walsh to
Command a new detachment of the Northwest Mounted Police. He was a tough, demanding,
yet fair and firm in separating the issues, well respected by the natives,
disliked by the wolfers and did much to settle this part of Canada. After
Sitting Bull defeated Custer he moved north and remained in this area from 1877
through 1881. Walsh managed to baby sit him without incident until he left.
When he did and peace was more the norm in the Cypress Hills, the fort closed in
1883.

One Northwest Mounted Policeman was killed in those early
days. A young trooper who was tending horses between here and Fort Mc Murray never
returned. On November 17, 1879, his body was found with a bullet through the
back of his head. It is still an enigma and a figurative stain on the now
rarely worn dress red tunics of the men who “always get their man.” The murder
of the man with the improbable name of Marmaduke Graburn remains even now an
open case with the RMCP.

The park straddles the provincial border into Saskatchewan.
There is much to see on that side and I will on my way out. Most of the camping
is here near the town site of Elkwater. It is a charming place of cottages, a
store and restaurant combination and an excellent Visitor Center in which the
artifacts of the area are displayed. One of the ladies working the campground check-in
lives here all year and says 90 other hardy souls do as well. The snow and wind
chill here in January is not something in which I would want to participate yet
she, like the man I met the other night who lives 20 miles from the Arctic Circle and can’t even
drive all the way home, find such weather and isolation just fine. Each claim
there is lots to do where they live and were surprised I would think otherwise.

A nasty wind a cold greets our departure from this lovely
place and we more to Saskatchewan. Wrestling the van down the road becomes
ominous amidst weather reports of a very wet weekend. I am forced to give up
two stops and move on through Swift Current and Moose Jaw on the Queens
highway. We turn south trying to find
blue skies and largely fail, ending up in Moose Mountain Provincial Park on the
east side of “Sask” as it is often referred to here. It is a bleak province on
the whole, and appears less well off than its neighbor. The unemployment is
higher and the population smaller. Given my small window of opportunity to see it
I cannot be sure, yet even the Provincial Parks are not as well kept, the
people seemingly more distracted, less friendly than those in the Provinces have
been in so far. It is flat, so flat, to quote a source I cannot recall, it may
not be the end of the earth, but you can see it from here.

Tomorrow we make one more stop in Manitoba and visit
(assuming the rain does not catch up to us again) the International Peace
Garden on the border of Manitoba and North Dakota, said to be lovely. Should
the weather catch us again we will move on further to the east and return to
the United States through Minnesota.

See you on the other side where my telephone works, WiFi far
more common, and even cable television available.